Vintage Stamps Series: Space part 1, & another Giveaway!

Happy New Year! The closest I'm coming to making a resolution is a desire to post here more regularly and continue to learn new stuff. Maybe get off my ass some. But resolutions seem designed to make people feel bad about themselves and go buy gym memberships, so I avoid them.

I'm continuing the vintage stamp show-off series, and, to celebrate making it to 2016, giving away some stamps, too. Before we dig in, make sure you read to the end for giveaway details, and check out my first vintage stamps post for some tips for getting started.

Update: The Giveaway is over - the winner has been notified. 

I love myself some themes when it comes to stamps (wait until I share my Halloween-theme collection), and lately have been getting all the space-themed ones I could find (and justify the cost of). I've been wanting to show off my collection as it stands but have optimistically called this part 1 of the Space miniseries, because I hope there will be a part 2 (I'm missing several!).

I can never travel in space (claustrophobic, so the idea of being trapped in a small enclosure for any length of time...shudder), but I have been fascinated with it since my early days of watching Star Trek re-runs. One of my favorite books is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and I love old sci-fi movies, so fantastical/fictional imagery is fun, too. Here are the space-themed stamps I currently have, in no real order. I just re-read that and realized it sounds like I only care about fictional space. Not true. Not at all.

The 1981 Space Achievements (18¢) stamps were the first I acquired, starting with a pane of 8 tucked into a lot of loose stamps ordered from an eBay seller. They led me to start looking for other space-themed stamps.

I didn't think that these 1997 Space Discovery (32¢) stamps were real when I first saw them. I haven't done any reading on them, but the location is obviously Mars, so this fits in with my love of the fantastical and fictional, do you grok?

These 2000 Hubble (33¢) stamps are breathtaking. There are 5, with each row having a different order.

Here are a few random, loose examples:

• 1948 3¢ Palomar Mountain Observatory
• 1962 4¢ Project Mercury, honoring the John Glenn-piloted Mercury-Atlas 6 flight)
• 1971 8¢ Space Achievement Decade (pictured here in reverse order)
  
  Below:
• 1975 10¢ Mariner 10 (launched Nov. 1973 for a 2-yr mission to explore Venus & Mercury)
• 1975 10¢ Pioneer (10 was launched in March 1972; 11 in April 1973)

Giveaway

Thanks for reading! I can't promise to always give away stamps when I do a vintage post, but I am this time! Winner will get the stamps in the image at top of this post (or to the right). All stamps are unused and unhinged, but not necessarily mint.

How to Enter: It's easy! Just comment here and share your favorite scientific or sci-fi work (any medium). Sharing is appreciated, but not required. I'd like to grow my readership, but I don't think that forcing people to repost and tag friends is a way to do it for real. The contest will end on January 15th. Make sure I can find you!!

Last time, only one person commented :-( , so this time, I'm hoping to DOUBLE that :-)